PSL 2024 Pause
In September 2023, Volos and Pelion experienced a cataclysmic climate collapse event - two floods, a few weeks apart, which devastated the city and the region. While described by many as ‘an act of God’ (θεομηνία) or just as ‘the rains’, for us at PSL it was a shocking episode of the ‘strange weather’ we had been discussing at our lab on Ec/o/ntologies just a few months earlier. For us, the strange weather that caught up with us was hardly a fluke, a one-time event, but testament to the strangulating grip of racism, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism on the water, the air, the land. We should note that in July the Volos area was also afflicted by forest fires, ringing the city…
What does this have to do with this year’s PSL? Well, just about everything. While it confirmed that our turn during our past two labs to environmental humanities and practices of survivance was timely, these events also brought us face to face with our own precariousness and vulnerability. Makrinitsa was at the epicenter of the rainfall (setting an all-time European record), the road to the village knocked out for weeks (and the back road through Koukourava still not repaired) while the starting point for last year’s sound walk in the Brani parking lot simply slipped off the mountain…
Reflect, Retreat, Repair
As with the pandemic the local mood has been to return to business as usual as soon as possible, rather than explore what ‘repair’ could mean at this juncture (the second keyword in our Strange Weather symposium). Just rebuild the road, clean up the mud and continue on as before…
For the organizing team living in Volos, however, this traumatic event affected our home and our university (also flooded), our sense of the urgency around learning and sharing the skills of survivance (no longer a bit of a science-fiction scenario), a reboot of our political and intellectual toolkits to truly address the impending climate collapse that is here.
This summer we have decided to step back, rest and care for ourselves and for PSL itself. Following five successful iterations of the Pelion Summer Lab, the time has come to pause and reflect on what the PSL has been and what it might become. The organizing team will meet for 5 days in Kato Gatzea in June for this purpose.
Inheritance
How does one inherit a summer school, with no permanent infrastructure or funding, and an experimental agenda? By their nature, experimental interventions begin with a certain enthusiasm of the new, the cutting edge. What happens when they ‘mature’ and become routinized as ‘best practices’? What happens when an experiment hits midlife?
In cat years, PSL would be 40 this summer… and if you add in the two years that we did not run during the pandemic, PSL would be nearing 50!
So much of what we have built since our founding in 2017 we owe to the energy, vision, and generosity of generations of cohort participants, faculty, community collaborators, sponsors, friends, and, of course, our growing organizing committee. Galvanized by this sense of indebtedness, we will be committing ourselves this summer to reflecting on the politics and ethics of inheritance.
To inherit something is to be afflicted by a “something-to-be-done”: it is to be called to account for what remains of us and for us in what passes on and away.
This involves first looking back, to clarify our response-ability to all we have gained since our initiative took off. So much of our identity as the Pelion Summer Lab has been preoccupied by a central objective: how can we provision an enduringly capacious space for international and trans-disciplinary collaboration and publicly engaged experimentation informed by placed-based social movements and the arts? This challenge represents both our loftiest ideal and the one that has most thoroughly informed every administrative and (extra)curricular decision we’ve taken, including the existential ones we now face: Why do we do this? Should we keep doing this? Can we keep doing this?
This year’s PSL is borne out of these hard questions. Cultivating our response-ability along these lines thus involves grappling with the realities before us: the precariousness of our academic existences in the social sciences and humanities in this political moment, the vagaries of funding, the joys and challenges of horizontal collaborative organizing.
Collaborative PSL publication
In an attempt to now honor the contributions that have shaped us collectively, we will be organizing the publication of our very own retrospective account of what the PSL is, as relayed through a series of key words that constellate the congregating themes and participant contributions of these last many years. We will be soliciting contributions from past faculty and participants around the themes of our past labs.
Serious play
Of course, inheritance concerns the past only insofar as it finds in this past an orientation to, and purpose in, a future. Towards these ends, members of the organizing committee will be convening in person this summer to outline a strategic vision for the PSL moving forward.
This will involve a series of debriefing and brainstorming sessions in consultation with solicited past participant and organizing committee feedback. The composition of our organizing committee continues to evolve, with new members joining us in charting our vision for the future. This summer will grant us the opportunity to welcome and consolidate our new organizing committee.
Naturally, all this organizing will entail some serious play. The PSL would not be the PSL without its customary rituals of effervescence, whether these take place on the beach or in a mountain village. The annual reunion party will take place on June 15, 2024…
In September 2023, Volos and Pelion experienced a cataclysmic climate collapse event - two floods, a few weeks apart, which devastated the city and the region. While described by many as ‘an act of God’ (θεομηνία) or just as ‘the rains’, for us at PSL it was a shocking episode of the ‘strange weather’ we had been discussing at our lab on Ec/o/ntologies just a few months earlier. For us, the strange weather that caught up with us was hardly a fluke, a one-time event, but testament to the strangulating grip of racism, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism on the water, the air, the land. We should note that in July the Volos area was also afflicted by forest fires, ringing the city…
What does this have to do with this year’s PSL? Well, just about everything. While it confirmed that our turn during our past two labs to environmental humanities and practices of survivance was timely, these events also brought us face to face with our own precariousness and vulnerability. Makrinitsa was at the epicenter of the rainfall (setting an all-time European record), the road to the village knocked out for weeks (and the back road through Koukourava still not repaired) while the starting point for last year’s sound walk in the Brani parking lot simply slipped off the mountain…
Reflect, Retreat, Repair
As with the pandemic the local mood has been to return to business as usual as soon as possible, rather than explore what ‘repair’ could mean at this juncture (the second keyword in our Strange Weather symposium). Just rebuild the road, clean up the mud and continue on as before…
For the organizing team living in Volos, however, this traumatic event affected our home and our university (also flooded), our sense of the urgency around learning and sharing the skills of survivance (no longer a bit of a science-fiction scenario), a reboot of our political and intellectual toolkits to truly address the impending climate collapse that is here.
This summer we have decided to step back, rest and care for ourselves and for PSL itself. Following five successful iterations of the Pelion Summer Lab, the time has come to pause and reflect on what the PSL has been and what it might become. The organizing team will meet for 5 days in Kato Gatzea in June for this purpose.
Inheritance
How does one inherit a summer school, with no permanent infrastructure or funding, and an experimental agenda? By their nature, experimental interventions begin with a certain enthusiasm of the new, the cutting edge. What happens when they ‘mature’ and become routinized as ‘best practices’? What happens when an experiment hits midlife?
In cat years, PSL would be 40 this summer… and if you add in the two years that we did not run during the pandemic, PSL would be nearing 50!
So much of what we have built since our founding in 2017 we owe to the energy, vision, and generosity of generations of cohort participants, faculty, community collaborators, sponsors, friends, and, of course, our growing organizing committee. Galvanized by this sense of indebtedness, we will be committing ourselves this summer to reflecting on the politics and ethics of inheritance.
To inherit something is to be afflicted by a “something-to-be-done”: it is to be called to account for what remains of us and for us in what passes on and away.
This involves first looking back, to clarify our response-ability to all we have gained since our initiative took off. So much of our identity as the Pelion Summer Lab has been preoccupied by a central objective: how can we provision an enduringly capacious space for international and trans-disciplinary collaboration and publicly engaged experimentation informed by placed-based social movements and the arts? This challenge represents both our loftiest ideal and the one that has most thoroughly informed every administrative and (extra)curricular decision we’ve taken, including the existential ones we now face: Why do we do this? Should we keep doing this? Can we keep doing this?
This year’s PSL is borne out of these hard questions. Cultivating our response-ability along these lines thus involves grappling with the realities before us: the precariousness of our academic existences in the social sciences and humanities in this political moment, the vagaries of funding, the joys and challenges of horizontal collaborative organizing.
Collaborative PSL publication
In an attempt to now honor the contributions that have shaped us collectively, we will be organizing the publication of our very own retrospective account of what the PSL is, as relayed through a series of key words that constellate the congregating themes and participant contributions of these last many years. We will be soliciting contributions from past faculty and participants around the themes of our past labs.
Serious play
Of course, inheritance concerns the past only insofar as it finds in this past an orientation to, and purpose in, a future. Towards these ends, members of the organizing committee will be convening in person this summer to outline a strategic vision for the PSL moving forward.
This will involve a series of debriefing and brainstorming sessions in consultation with solicited past participant and organizing committee feedback. The composition of our organizing committee continues to evolve, with new members joining us in charting our vision for the future. This summer will grant us the opportunity to welcome and consolidate our new organizing committee.
Naturally, all this organizing will entail some serious play. The PSL would not be the PSL without its customary rituals of effervescence, whether these take place on the beach or in a mountain village. The annual reunion party will take place on June 15, 2024…
